Welcome to my 3rd grade classroom.  I am super excited to be here and sharing my love of literacy!  I teach in a self contained classroom and currently have 18 wonderful kiddos. We push to have a 120 minute block for literacy and 90 minute block for math.  As often as possible, we layer our science and social studies curriculum with our ELA standards.  This allows us to extend the learning for those concepts and the kids ABSOLUTELY love our units of study. 
I am an avid reader of professional books.  I adore Donalyn Miller and Pernille Ripp and follow their work often.  One of my all time favorites is The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild.  I am currently reading Passionate Readers by Ripp.  Over my 22 years of teaching, I have drastically changed my philosophy of teaching reading.  I teach kids to love books and stories and I despise kids believing they are "levels" of text or colors of "dots".  My ultimate goal for my students is to create life long readers.